"The Beatles with the Lower Score, it Breaks my Heart": Framing a Media Education Response to Datafication and Algorithmic Recommendations in Digital Media Infrastructures

Individuals are now deeply engaged with digital infrastructures which present tailored content through recommendation algorithms. The importance and uncanniness of these digital infrastructures is of increasing concern. Despite their influence on media practices and the consumption of cultural goods, algorithmic operations remain largely opaque and little understood. This chapter will present a media education initiative that bridges theoretical contributions coming from media education scholars and science and technology studies. The initiative was built on a design-based approach and took the form of an educational pen-and-paper game called “In the Shoes of an Algorithm” leading participants to act as YouTube engineers and algorithms. The game was developed and tested over a dozen of two-hour-long recorded sessions with about 200 high school and university students, public and academic workers. The game was created both to discover and address the daily problems experienced by the public when interacting with recommendation algorithms. The game achieved two educational outcomes: understanding the importance of social data collected by these infrastructures and the entanglement of technical constraints and social objectives, achieved when designing computational rules.